EzHost365 announced today it has deployed the SpamExperts Incoming Mail Filter to on all shared hosting accounts, automatically providing customers with enterprise-grade spam protection at no additional charge to them.

The hardware-based solution offers one of the industry’s most robust protections against spam, relying on public and internal anti-spam data sources to provide optimal protection. The Incoming Email Security Firewall combines more than 50 different filtering mechanisms that are continuously updated and configured to assure spam filtering is accurate and effective.

“For many of our customers, spam email creates more than just a nuisance—it also causes significant losses in productivity and can expose end users to a myriad of security threats, ranging from viruses to sophisticated phishing attacks. Unfortunately, the problem is not getting better, as many industry leaders had hoped”. “By investing in this enterprise-grade, next-generation anti-spam technology for all of our shared hosting customers, we can deliver a tangible value-add that separates us from our competitors.”

According to SpamExperts, filtering is divided into two stages. Stage 1, the SMTP-stage, analyses the behaviour and reputation of the sending server. Around 95% of all spam can already be detected at this stage. In stage 2, the content-stage, the actual content of the message is checked and the remaining 5% of spam messages are detected. Together, a spam-score probability is calculated and based on this customizable score, messages will be accepted, rejected, or quarantined.

The first of many new features to hit our client area is the instant power control and bandwidth graphs for dedicated server clients. These can be found by clicking “My Products & Services” then on your dedicated server.

There’s nothing more frustrating than your server locking up and kicking you out of an SSH session. Now if disaster strikes you can hit the reboot button and your box will be hard rebooted. We’ve also included a few bandwidth graphs to show you transfer from the last day, week and month – ideal for keeping an eye on your bandwidth allowances.

Offering 100% uptime is always our goal, however when it came to critical kernel updates to fix security issues we have no choice but to reboot servers. However, thanks to Ksplice there is now a solution.

Keeping up to date with kernel updates is extremely important and often fixes important security holes. In 2009 there were 16 released, each requires a reboot which takes around 15 minutes to complete. This means there would have been a total of 4 hours downtime just to update the kernel. Ksplice allows us to perform these updates without rebooting and without any impact on performance.

The other advantage is that we can apply patches instantly. We no longer need to plan ahead and give a few days notice of an impending reboot, during this time the server may be open to an exploit causing obvious security problems.

Due to popular demand and increased capacity with our new R1Soft backup servers, the retention has been raised from 14 days to 31 days. This means instead of the original 56 restore points there are now 124 backups you can restore from!

R1Soft is an incremental backup solution used on all shared and VPS nodes to protect your data. To ensure backups are always up to date we run 4 backups each day at regular intervals.

Shared customers can also click the ‘R1Soft Restore’ button within cPanel to view and restore their own files automatically.

This new feature allows any VPS user to click ‘Central Backups’ within their VPS control panel and take a snapshot of their server. This will then be transferred off-site and kept indefinitely, the server can also be restored from this backup within seconds with the click of a button.

The complete server is backed up including all files, databases, configuration settings and any applications installed on the server. This is ideal for taking a quick backup before performing a software upgrade or new installation incase the work doesn’t go as planned.

We allow each server to keep one snapshot by default, if a second is generated it would simply overwrite the first. However if you would like the option to keep more backups on our central server, please contact us.

A number of clients have asked if we have ever considered installing Softaculous instead of Installatron. We’ve been testing Softaculous on our development servers to see if it’s worth deploying and we’re pleased to announce it has now been installed on all shared and reseller servers!

This has been discussed and we have decided we will not be removing Installatron and both will run side-by-side, however we won’t be creating our WHMCS auto-installer for Installatron, this will now be handled by Softaculous.

Softaculous is an auto installer for cPanel and DirectAdmin. Unlike other auto installers Softaculous is much faster, well designed and it installs all scripts in just ONE STEP. The creators of Softaculous are constantly adding new scripts to their installer, at the time of writing this post there are currently 136 scripts that can be automatically installed.

Softaculous also handles software updates and can import existing installs. To view a list of scripts that can be automatically installed and updated, click here. To access simply click the ‘Softaculous Installer’ button within cPanel.

cPanel has now been upgraded to 11.25 on all servers. This bring a whole range of new features including the ability to edit DNS zones right from cPanel, an enhanced AJAX interface and more.

Performance

cPanel/WHM 11.25 implements some major changes throughout our mailing system. We’ve adjusted the Exim configuration to allow a single process to listen on multiple ports, thereby reducing RAM and CPU usage. In addition to this, we’ve also improved quota lookup efficiency.

RoundCube webmail can now operate using the lightweight SQLite database engine. This gives each email account its own SQLite database, and assigns ownership of the RoundCube process to the cPanel account, for easier process accounting.

Version 11.25 also updates RoundCube, SquirrelMail, and Mailman to their most current versions.

Security

We know that security is important to you. That’s why we’ve added numerous security features to cPanel/WHM 11.25. Our new security token system attempts to prevent cross-site request forgery (XSRF) attacks by appending URLs with a session token in the form of cpsess<number>. When this feature is enabled, absolute URLs are no longer allowed. This new feature helps to ensure a safe environment for you and your customers.

Refined User Interface

We’ve revamped the cPanel home page with even cleaner HTML, and reduced the number of HTTP requests the page sends, resulting in shorter load times. Plus, we optimized the CSS used by cPanel, to speed page loading throughout the entire cPanel interface.

We’ve also overhauled one of cPanel’s most frequently accessed areas: the Email Accounts page. It now combines all the major functionality involved with email accounts into a single page: you can add, search, sort, and delete accounts, as well as change passwords and quotas, all without leaving the page. With its clean new design, this page provides a faster, more intuitive way to manage your email.

cPanel/WHM 11.25 comes equipped with an improved editor for MX (mail exchanger) entries. This new editor allows you to configure multiple mail exchangers with the same priority, for balancing the load on your mail servers.